Francis Bacon — "It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to…"
It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear.
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More from Francis Bacon
"And it is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea."
"Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law."
"The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds."
"The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude."
"Imperial expansion is preferable to civil war, and that Britain is faced with something of a binary choice."
About Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
English philosopher whose Novum Organum (1620) laid out the inductive method that became the foundation of modern empirical science. Closely associated with Galileo Galilei (contemporary scientific revolutionary). For an intellectual contrast, see Aristotelian scholasticism, the syllogistic, deductive philosophical tradition that ruled medieval universities — Bacon's Novum Organum literally means 'new instrument' — the explicit replacement for Aristotle's Organon. The entire scientific revolution turned on which logic was correct: deduction from authority or induction from observation.
The standard scholarly entry points to Francis Bacon's work: Lisa Jardine (Queen Mary University of London, Renaissance scholar) — Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (1974); Jonathan Marwil (Michigan, intellectual historian) — The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621 (1976); Perez Zagorin (Rochester, historian of ideas) — Francis Bacon (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Francis Bacon.